Multiple Browsers

I just had a first hand experience on why having more than 1 browser is really necessary. For some reason ,on Firefox, my normal browser the AOL web page was not working. I sent some music to myself and really needed to get it off of my email, but every time I attempted to use the site my computer froze and I got one of those annoying "Program is Not Responding" deals. After about 7 times of repeating this process, I finally got the idea that maybe Firefox, while usually an excellent browser, was having trouble with AOL, which just updated its look. So, I used the Internet explorer that comes with every Windows computer, and I was able to access the site and retrieve my music perfectly fine.

Audio Converters

A nifty little find, that I recently found.... When doing my latest Tech Trends homework assignment, I needed to convert between different types of sound files, however, I could not do it on itunes. So, I just typed in "mp3 AIF converter" into a google search, and I found a nice program called Audio Converter Pro, that converts all types of audio files. For the full program, you must pay, but there is a free demo that lets you convert very short files (I believe there is a 2 minute limit) so it was perfect for homework assignments that needed converting, to and from mp3, mp4, AIF, WAV and maybe a couple others. I am exploring converting midi to mp3 form so that I can send out compositions that I have written on Finale for my Rock Band over the internet before practices so that everyone can get a feel beforehand. To do this I imported midi into Audacity then imported that into the converter after exporting as an mp3, and I can manipulate it better in Audacity as an AIF file.

Audacity

When leaving my first session, I was given a CD of it and was asked "Is it cool if I make this an AIF file?" To which I enthusiastically said yes to, and was very excited that I knew what that was because of tech trends class. Even though I plan on doing the actual editing in my engineers studio, I thought it would be fun and interesting to explore the capabilities of Audacity that we downloaded for class with recordings of myself. The first thing I did was utilize the hard limiter function, which took out some of the abrasiveness picked up by the mikes. I then experimented with equalization to try and get an even better volume from all parts of the instrument. I felt that the reverb (or GVerb) was a little complicated and also produced kind of an unrealistic reverb effect that, while it sounded very cool, it distorted the actual sound way to much (even with just a little bit added) to send into a competition. But it did make me sound very good, so I will definitely utilize it at some point when making recordings not for review!

mikes

So I did a couple rounds of recording a few days ago and would like to talk about mikes. Both my sound engineer and I had a very educational experience learning about miking the violin. He was a student as well. Usually when I recorded in the past at my previous school, there was a specialist in classical music and we were always able to rent out a hall, but this time a studio was utilized. The first studio was very small and we used 2 different mikes usually used for singing. We found that this di not sound very good. So after a few takes, we used only one of the mikes that we found made the sound quality better for violin. My engineer said that it was not so good for voice, thats why it was the backup mike, but we discovered it was great for violin. We also increased the distance between me and the mikes, and this had a tremendous effect on the sound. The next day we used a larger studio and 2 of the same mikes that we discovered were good violin. We also placed them even farther away, and this seemed to be a winning combination. Now we both know how to successfully record violin, so the next time I do sessions for somebody not really familiar with my instrument, I can lead them in the right direction. This is something I think would be beneficial to every instrumentalist, learning the best way to record yourself professionally, because we can never assume that the sound engineers are necessarily experts at our instruments!